7 creative SOCIAL PROOF ideas to build trust on your blog.

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What’s up bloggers! No interview today, just coming at you with some solid social proof ideas to add trust and legitimacy to your blog. Enjoy.

So, I searched a WHILE to find the perfect definition for “social proof,” and pretty much hated the ones I found. Here’s the best I could come up with:

The Social Proof Theory, popularized by Robert Cialdini, maintains that a person who does not know what the proper behavior for a certain situation is, will look to other people to imitate what they are doing and to provide guidance for his actions.

Basically, that means this: When website visitors land on your blog, social proof serves to add legitimacy and trust to your brand, and to you.

In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you a few really cool stories and ideas that will help you implement social proof on your own website.

Let’s dive in!

Also, be sure to leave a comment on this post below. I’ll choose one commenter and send them a free DYEB t-shirt! They are super comfy 🙂

Given that information beforehand, you’d likely choose the candidate with the most experience, and those 5-star reviews will carry a lot of weight in determining who the better masseuse is.

2 quick examples:

1 – The intro to this podcast above.

When I can feature several of my podcast guests, this helps adds an aura of “oh wow this podcast has had a LOT of awesome bloggers on the podcast,” or “oh wow this podcast has had JLD, Neil Patel, Michelle Schroeder, Nick Loper, etc, etc…it must be pretty good.”

At least that’s what I’m aiming for.

2 – Amazon reviews/ratings

What are some of the first things we look at when we view products on Amazon?

How MANY ratings does it have?

What’s the rating?

We’re looking for social proof.

When we see tons of other people that bought in and supported a product, Leaving awesome reviews, we’re more likely to judge that product as being favorable and a higher quality.

3 – My old personal finance blog

I manufactured a nice collage of several readers holding “I <3 The Smarter Dollar!” notecards lol. I didn’t specifically do this to build a social proof thingy…but it sure worked.

Plus, it was just super fun to put on my homepage!

I couldn’t find the collage, but I did find the individual pics people sent me. Here are two examples 🙂

Comment below with your thoughts from the episode! I’ll give away a t-shirt to one commentor 🙂

Reader Interactions

Comments

Hey folks! WHO WANTS A SHIRT. Leave a comment below!
Any comment will do.
* What you had for breakfast (I love breakfast)
* What you just published on your blog
* Loved this episode? Tell me
* Hated this episode? Maybe don’t tell me 🙂

Hey Pete – once again a great episode! Short, sweet (thinking of the wine) and filled with applicable ideas and insights from your own experience.
If you send T-shirts to Switzerland, I’d bring it around to Asia and of course to the Swiss Alps to provide you with selfies from all over with cool backgrounds \°o°/ – also, if you’d like to visit or join me travelling, let me know!

Also, I’m not sending one of my local tees to Switzerland…but I DO also have comfy tees on Amazon (they’re a darker color actually close to the brand color). I bet I could send one of those to you though.

Hey Pete super interesting – I’m still waiting on your resume so you can come help us build social proofs among expert recommenders at my day job!

I did a study in my last job with some PhD students and we looked at how ratings and reviews impact conversion on ecommerce pages. Interestingly, a product with 100 reviews and an average 5-star rating performs worse than a product with the same number of reviews and a 4.5-star average. I wonder if the same is true for blogging social proof. Do you need a random detractor mixed into to build some social proof into your social proof (i.e. convince everyone that these reviews/comments/whatever are real).

Now I’m wondering if I did this on accident when I published the reviews of the first product I did (A 30-day challenge back in October). I also included negative feedback and criticisms, right along with praise.

Eh. Probably not in my case, but you’re definitely on to something (or at least that study is).

RE: job – Just use my failure resume instead! https://doyouevenblog.com/fail I’m more proud of it anyways 😉 In all honesty I was super intrigued by the company and would LOVE to work there, but I also refuse to update resumes, apply, etc right now. I’m straight-up stubborn. Probably not the best trait for potential employees 🙂

Hey Pete! Great episode. I’m totes gonna use some of the tips mentioned on the podcast, in fact I already have! I loved the picture idea you did with the notecards. Keep up the awesome/useful content coming!